As always, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, California serves as the venue. The conference will be held from April 11-14. Except for the venue and period, I think this year's conference will bear few similarities to previous editions. Let me try and explain.

This year's theme is "MySQL, the ecosystem and Beyond". This means that the conference is using MySQL as an anchor for a myriad of topics which are of interest to a large majority of MySQL users. This explicitly leaves room for subjects that may not be directly related to the MySQL product proper.

So, not only products with a direct link to MySQL, such as drizzle and MariaDB are covered; NoSQL databases like CouchDB, MongoDB and Cassandra are quite well represented and the conference committee actively reached out to the PostgreSQL community to submit proposals. Traditional topics like scalability, performance and tuning remain strongly present, just like high availability, failover, and replication. As always, some of the world experts in this field will be speaking. In addition, infrastructural topics like virtualization and cloud computing are well represented (but of course, especially with regard to database management); One of the things I'm thrilled about is the presence of developer and applicattion centric topics like GIS, rapid application development, and object relational mapping.

Just take a look at the full schedule to get a taste of what this event will be offering. Personally, I think it's a great setup, and I'm happy and honored to attend!

In a series of upcoming blog posts, I plan to explain some of the subject matter regarding my own talk. But for now, I just want to tell you that I think this is going to be a great conference! I'm looking forward to attending a lot of high quality sessions, and meeting world leading experts in the MySQL and open source database ecosystem. I hope to see you there!

(Not sure this point came across, but the MQL that is subject of this talk is the Metaweb Query Language - not Pentaho's Metadata Query Language)

MQL-to-SQL is similar to Xmla4js that it makes it easier to access remote data from a modern javascript web application. But the similarities stop there:

- Xmla4js is a client-side javascript library to access existing XML/A servers; MQL-to-SQL is server-size PHP middleware to enable a RDBMS server to become a MQL server.

- Xmla4js takes MDX statements and discover commands as javascript strings from the client, wraps them inside SOAP envelopes to send them to the XML/A server; MQL-to-SQL receives MQL queries from the client and translates them to SQL statements so they can be executed by a RDBMS server

- Xmla4js receives SOAP responses and unmarshalls them into javascript data; MQL-to-SQL receives relational datasets from the RDBMS server, and sends them to the client as JSON results.

Despite these technical differences, MDX is analytic in nature, whereas MQL is (IMO) more suitable for OLTP purposes.

The current PHP implementation is just an initial one to see if it could be done. I think Java is actually a better fit for a number of reasons, as it offers better possibilities for concurrently executing the SQL statements (it's not impossible in PHP, but it's going to be ugly).

I would actually love to build a Java implementation but it's not on my short term to do list. However, I welcome any contributions to the project. I think MQL is a great language, and I'd love to have it inside Pentaho as well - For web applications, I think it's much better than SQL on multiple levels. So, if you're interested, let's talk about it and see if we can work something out together :)

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About Me

My name is Roland Bouman. If you like you can follow my @rolandbouman feed on twitter.
I'm a Web- and BI Developer and Information Analyst. I'm currently working as a Software Engineer for Pentaho, a world-leading Open Source Business Analytics Suite and Big Data Platform. In the past, I have worked for Inter Access, MySQL AB, Sun Microsystems and Strukton Rail.
I authored two books: Pentaho Solutions (Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-48432-6) and "Pentaho Kettle Solutions" (Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-63517-9).
I'm proud to be elected Oracle Ace for my MySQL expertise.